The cost benefits of virtualization and cloud computing are very seductive. Fewer physical servers in the data center leads to reduced power and cooling costs, not to mention savings on server hardware and related maintenance over time. At a time when IT departments are driven to cut costs, virtualization projects are under way everywhere.

However, the challenge as we virtualize applications is that the applications become untethered from their physical servers and traditional management tools lose visibility. According to a June 2008 Gartner Summit presentation titled “An Overview of Virtualization Server Management Standards, Products and Providers,” given by Cameron Haight, a research vice president at Gartner, Inc., "Virtualization changes infrastructure physics related to time and space. The result will cause disruptions for management technology providers and consumers as many of today's tools can't support this new paradigm shift."

This loss of visibility to virtualized applications is creating a mess for many IT organizations. After making large investments in traditional management solutions that use hardware probes and software agents, IT can’t answer basic questions like:

• What is the impact of a change to my virtualized environment on IT resources and customer experience?
• How are my users experiencing their applications?
• Why is one user or location having a problem while other users around them are not?
• Which applications should I virtualize first? Which applications are not good candidates?

Xangati’s latest addition to the AppMonitor suite – the Xangati AppMonitor for Virtualization Management and enhanced Virtual Trouble Ticket (VTT) portal – is focused on answering these and other important questions by restoring visibility to virtualized and cloud-based applications. Unlike traditional management products, Xangati’s Application Management 2.0 solution requires no hardware or software footprint. Like virtualized and cloud applications, Xangati is untethered from the physical and provides complete visibility.

It is the added component of “liveness” (or complete situational awareness) in what Xangati does that ends up being the winning solution. As we know far too well, performance problems can come and go in the blink of an eye. Legacy systems are either driven by agents or probes that need to be plugged in everywhere, are too infrequent or stagnant in their reporting, or simply provide suboptimal tracking mechanisms back to the IT front lines. Essentially, there comes a point where too little information exists, the moment is lost, and the problem is too hard to effectively resolve. Unless, of course, the end user is actually savvy enough to relay the full and accurate experience – which we know is a rare occurance indeed.

Having complete visibility and being able to track everything (no matter what or where it is) is the only real way at efficient problem resolution. It is the extension of “liveness” that provides a richer understanding of the end-user experience – by relaying the entire experience (including when and where performances delay occurred, the end users’ response time, etc.) – that sets Application Management 2.0 solutions, like Xangati’s, apart. By unanimous vote time and again, IT staffers tell us that being able to accurately recreate problems that arise – especially as related to cloud applications – is the must-have to being effective in their jobs. Sadly, it’s almost never available.

With Xangati, IT organizations can plan, monitor and manage their untethered applications to assure that they achieve significant benefits without negatively impacting user experience.